Opportunites for new startups abound

ENAR

Near the center of Beirut sits the heart of Lebanon’s startup ecosystem, the Beirut Digital District. It is mainly here that Lebanon’s entrepreneurs gather to pitch and develop solutions to problems that are uniquely Lebanese, and others that are less so. The country’s entrepreneurship ecosystem today faces challenges that are not insurmountable, and there are opportunities that may not be quite the stature of a “unicorn”—the rapid ascent to a  valuation of at least $1 billion—but are attractive and exciting nonetheless. Executive has examined the companies jostling for these opportunities in its profiles of this year’s batch of new startups, a survey the magazine conducts annually. On the one hand, we see the ecosystem advancing and evolving in good ways. Interspersed with that is the fact that the entrepreneurship ecosystem is still incomplete. The sector’s most needed financial elements, in this magazine’s view, are more allocations of risk-friendly capital and